2010 was stuffed with technological innovation and gadgets that bedazzle (and break your budget.)

For 2011, I recommend the following five technologies. Some may be familiar, some may be new to you, but all are worth a try.

1. Landline phones

Mobile phones are great on the go, but their voice feature is suboptimal: reception can be spotty, calls get dropped, and noise distortion can turn a conversation into an exercise in misunderstanding.

With close to hundred percent uptime, landline phones are attractive to consumers who are willing to trade portability and location-based check-ins for reliability and sound quality.

Landline phones are a must-buy for entrepreneurs and business professionals. A call on your mobile or on your landline—it can mean the difference between losing and winning a business deal.

Cost: Landline phones are inexpensive ($5 and up), but plans can set you back an extra $40 in addition to your mobile plan. Qwest is a leader in landline phone connections.

Phone features vary by brand and model. A cordless phone provides limited portability within the home, but security experts recommend having at least one corded phone in the home for emergency situations, when electricity may not be available to recharge battery-operated phones.

2. E-mail

Texts, tweets, and status updates: who needs another communication channel? Read more…

Microsoft recently announced that the consumer version of Office 2010  will soon be available for free: Office Web Apps. This might just make Google start sweating. If not, it should.

Let’s face it: given the choice between Google Docs and the polished, well-tested and universally approved Microsoft Office, which would you choose? Yep, Office. After all, then you know your recipient will be able to open, read and edit the document, know how it works and not have to sign up for any new account. Office is the industry standard. Now you can access the docs everywhere, without e-mailing them, carrying them on a flash drive or bringing your laptop to the site where you need your docs. You can log into any PC and get your stuff. You can get the docs on your mobile phone. It’s where you are when you need it. Read more…

Image by Bizzia.com

I can’t emphasize the value of creating your online identity.  I totally respect those who want to keep things private, but there is a way to balance privacy and making sure you are your identity is kosher.  Especially in this digital age, it is important to develop your identity, then control what is being shared.  Luckily, we have so many resources to make this possible.

On the other hand, there are way too many sites to manage.  LinkedIn.  Facebook.  Twitter.  MySpace… you name it.  I can’t even keep track anymore.  But I do know that if I don’t take ownership of my identity, chances are someone else will do it for me, whether they do it deliberately or not.  How many times have you found pictures of yourself on social networking sites that others posted?  Or how about information about you that is shared because you were “just part of the story”?  Whether you like it or not, social networks are successful because of their transparency, and there’s no changing the truth behind that reality.  The irony of not being (somewhat) transparent about yourself is that you actually end up losing control of your privacy.

Read more…

Every single day people, arguable most, blindly accept companies’ TOS (“terms of service”).  They unresistingly click “I Agree” to whatever legal jargon is in between them and their desired product or service.  Why?  People trust the companies have their best interest in mind.  They trust, for example, that the photos they post to Facebook are not thrown up on a billboard on I-5, or a silly comment they made on a friend’s wall will live on for eternity.

It comes down to people believing Mark Zuckerberg when he says, “We wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.  The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”

Read more…

During the 2008 Presidential election, the Obama campaign pushed the envelope in two significant ways: they set out to change the face of the electoral map by mobilizing new and young voters; and they took the guesswork out of their resource allocation strategy to achieve that goal.

Any real change to the political system needed a change in the electorate. Rather than fighting over the same aging, well-off, white constituents, the Obama campaign went after the young and unregistered voices–a heretofore untapped resource estimated at 55 million potential voters as of 2004 (Hayes 2008). Read more…

Facebook. Twitter. Mybarackobama.com. Text messaging. The president-elect used all of these digital tools to devastating effect in the 2008 election. How did he do it? What strategic lessons can we learn from Barack Obama’s high-tech campaign? How might he deploy this online army of millions to govern? And does President Obama’s historic rise to the White House also propel social networking into the mainstream?

The answers to these important questions have a profound impact on the very near future of our democracy, as well as how we organize, communicate and even do business in the digital age. On the eve of the Obama inauguration, the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media program held a dynamic, engaging “UW Insight” conversation that sought to put this digital revolution in perspective.

Part 1 includes the Introduction to this event and a presentation by Prof. Lance Bennett, UW Political Science and Communication, on the digital tools employed during the election.

Parts 2 & 3 after the jump…

Read more…

I sometimes have the troubling thought of “what’s the point?” Yes, I am referring to social media and/or social networking and not the question of whether to put on clothes each morning.

While questioning something that I study on a daily basis might be a pointless task, I would like to think it helps me to analyze it and understand it. This question is mainly ignited by other people who say “what’s the point of blogging?” Or, “what’s the point of Twitter? Aren’t people just stroking their egos with it by thinking that people actually care what you have to say?”

I have to agree with the naysayers sometimes. Sometimes, I really don’t get how some social media is anything more than the expectation that people actually care what I have to say. And other times… it makes complete and total sense to me. Are the times it makes sense when I think what I have to say is important? I don’t know.

Am I the only one who ever questions this? If you would like to point out the irony of this post in the comments, I encourage you to do so.

Is science-fiction catching up to social networking? In a recent PC World article it seems that way. Imagine wearing a shirt with a bar code that can connect a stranger to your social networking profile by a click of your cellphone camera. Well a company in the Netherlands called W-41 has adapted such a product. In my opinion only a special sort of person would wear an item like this on a regular basis. But for other uses like conferences or singles events it “could” be useful.

The article states this branding as an “online-offline integration,” and the concept is interesting, although I am not sure how accpetable this is in a typical social situation. I feel this could remove some of the face-to-face interaction, can you image getting an email saying “I saw you at the bar, but I was too scared to talk to you, so instead I took a picture of you so I could email you later?”